Most trading card games end when the company stops printing them. Decipher's Lord of the Rings Trading Card Game ended because a contract ran out — and its players simply kept going.
A game with an expiry date
Decipher launched the game in November 2001, a month before the first film, under a license from New Line Cinema to use the film imagery. It was an immediate success. In 2002 it won the Origins Awards for Best Trading Card Game of 2001 and for Best Graphic Presentation of a card game.
The license, though, had a fixed end: the summer of 2007. Everything Decipher did afterward was a race against that date.
After the films
The trouble began once the trilogy was over. With no new films to follow, Decipher reworked the game in 2004 to give it a life beyond the story, and many players disliked the changes. At the same time the company ran into serious financial difficulties and laid off much of its staff. Releases slipped: one expansion, The Hunters, arrived seven months late.
As the deadline approached, two planned sets — The Great Eye and Shelob's Lair — were cut and never released. The last expansion, Age's End, came out in June 2007, weeks before the license expired. Then production, distribution and promotion all stopped. The online version of the game closed its servers in June 2010.
In under six years the game had produced nineteen sets.
The players took over
The game did not die with its license. Its community gathered online, and a volunteer organization, the Player's Council, has since taken on the work a publisher would normally do: maintaining the rules, rebalancing cards that had been too strong for two decades, and designing new content for people still playing a game that officially ended in 2007.
For collectors, the fixed end has a plain consequence. Nothing from the Decipher era will ever be printed again, and every sealed box that is opened reduces a supply that stopped growing nearly twenty years ago.
In our catalog
We have four sealed products from the game's first three years: the Fellowship of the Ring booster box of 2001, where it all began; The Two Towers of 2002; The Return of the King of 2003, the last of the three film-based base sets; and a Siege of Gondor starter deck display from 2004, whose premium cards were only ever sold in starter decks. The booster boxes hold 36 packs of 11 cards each.
See The Fellowship of the Ring booster box
See The Two Towers booster box
See The Return of the King booster box
See the Siege of Gondor starter deck display
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